Taking a look at Cedar Rapids’ rich softball history

Editor's note: Bill Johnson is a Cedar Rapids historian who spent 30 years working for the U.S. Navy. This is the first of a five-part series on softball in Cedar Rapids.

By Bill Johnson, community contributor

At times it seems there always is a softball game going on somewhere in Cedar Rapids between late spring and early autumn.

Kids, adults, athletes and folks just out for some fun, all play on teams and leagues that serve as competitive outlets and allow them to enjoy the sport.

The story of softball in Cedar Rapids, however, is much richer than just this evening's game. In the glory days of the 1960s and '70s and '80s, Cedar Rapids was a hotbed of fast-pitch softball and routinely sent teams and players to the most elite levels of national and world championship competition. There was a time not long ago when grandstands that held more than 5,000 people enveloped a single softball diamond at Ellis Park, and there were nights when cheering fans filled those stands for a men's Major Open fast-pitch doubleheader.

In 1971, Cedar Rapids' own Welty Way-sponsored team was crowned Amateur Softball Association (ASA) national champions, and many of the players on that team ranked among the very best in the world. In 1987, Teleconnect repeated the feat, capturing the International Softball Congress World Championship in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The Manufacturers-and-Jobbers industrial baseball league played a slate every summer between 1924 and 1962, and terrific players filled teams, many of whom played at some professional level in the minor and major leagues. By 1963, however, that league folded, primarily due to the difficulty in finding corporate sponsors in town. Those sponsors, the economic backbone of Cedar Rapids, began to shift their advertising funds away from baseball, which had no more than 100 players in the entire league, to softball, which at one point encompassed more than 130 local teams. From an advertising perspective, softball was truly the people's game.

Softball - the sport - was born in the late 1880s, a Chicago game actually intended to be played indoors, and in those days referred to by an array of names that included mush ball, kitten ball and even ladies baseball. By 1926, however, it had moved outdoors, spread throughout the Midwest and, by 1939, had become truly a global game capped by organized, world championship tournaments. Today, in many places, it has a stigma of being either a 'girls-only” game or a precursor to a few hours of beer-drinking after work. Those are narrow stereotypes. The fast-pitch version presents challenges that rival those in baseball and, at its higher levels, the slow-pitch variant is as much about defensive agility and acumen as it is moonshot home runs.

As far back as 1929 there was enough interest within Cedar Rapids that the city created the Diamond Ball Association, the first large-scale, municipally-sanctioned softball organization in this part of Iowa. From that humble start, the growth in softball eventually propelled Cedar Rapids into the top tier of American softball communities.